Time of Zombies (Book 2): The Zombie Hunter's Wife

by James, Jill

  Michelle swallowed down the big knot in her throat. Her friend had shared her infertility problems she’d had with her first husband. How she thought she would never be pregnant, never have kids. She squeezed back. “You will do what Dr. Drake said. Stay in bed. Rest. Everything will be fine.”

  Shaking her head, Emily rose up to her elbows. “Tomorrow is church. Something is going on with Beth. I have to go.” She fell back with a groan and a wheezing cough.

  Michelle shuddered and took a deep breath. “I’ll go.”

  Chapter Ten

  Rule #5 You must face your fears head on, or head off in the case of skinbags, because that is the best way to kill them. Fears and zombies.

  “You can do this, Michelle.” Emily held her hand and stared into her eyes. “You said you were a Psychology major in college. You need to see this man in his element. You need to talk to the women. I already played my hand. Bennett knows what I think of him but he hasn’t met you. You can play quiet and demure.”

  “Quiet and demure?” She snorted. “I know a lot of people from my past who would laugh at that picture.”

  Emily chuckled and grabbed her stomach and winced. “I know you don’t want to go outside but Seth and Teddy will protect you with their lives. Hell, I’ve seen you shoot. You could protect them. Only your fear is keeping you inside.”

  She worried her lower lip with her teeth until she tasted blood. “I know in my head that I will be safe, but in my heart I never want to leave these four walls. I know it’s stupid. You’ve been out there all by yourself.”

  “It’s not stupid,” Emily said, squeezing her hand. “You’re entitled to your feelings. It is dangerous out there. But life is dangerous. Your husband was a cop. Didn’t you know it would be dangerous every time he left for work?”

  “He chose that danger and I knew what I was signing up for as a cop’s wife. I didn’t sign up for the zombie apocalypse.”

  “None of us did, sweetie. We get what we get and we make the best of it a day at a time. Always been that way. Always will.”

  “Okay,” she replied, sitting up straighter. “But I’m not doing this every week. You get better, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She was still laughing as she left Emily to rest and shut the door quietly. The humor died like ashes on her tongue as she gazed around the yard and spotted everyone getting ready to head to Sunday services at the church. At least the Rogue Vantage had enough of wanting church-going and stayed quietly at the camp on Sundays. They’d gone once and refused to go again. She’d tried to get them to talk about it, but even talkative chatterbox Dylan just shook his head and walked away.

  Anxiety bit into her nerves. She swallowed deeply and closed her eyes. Deep breaths brought the lightheadedness under control. A shadow fell over her eyelids. Her eyes opened and Teddy stood before her. His face freshly shaved and in a clean shirt and jeans.

  “Do I look okay?” Her fingers smoothed over the fabric of her one and only dress. It fell to below her knees and just above her socks and hiking boots. She felt like an actress for a Little House on the Prairie remake. She hadn’t felt this pure and virginal since junior high.

  “Michelle, you look beautiful in everything you wear. But you aren’t worried about that dress. You’re worried about going outside. Now’s the time to change your mind if you’re going to go with us or not. No one is forcing you. This is your choice.”

  She shook her head. “I have to do this for Emily and I have to do it for myself. I’ll end up with agoraphobia if I don’t do this soon. We’ve been here six months and I haven’t even gone to the field for the trading or shooting practice.”

  “Agoraphobia?” He looked around at the asphalt ground and the deep-blue sky. “We are outside, you know.”

  She lightly punched his arm. “Metaphorically speaking, silly. I’ve been hiding behind these walls and inside these motor homes as if they could protect me. I should know that there is no protection anymore, shouldn’t I?”

  He clasped her arms and pulled her in close. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  She hugged him. “I won’t let anything happen to you either.”

  Her abundant confidence lasted just long enough for the front gate to start rolling back. The squeak of the wheels along the pavement grated on her nerves. Since the gate only opened enough for one person at a time, they lined up and went through like the endless wait at an amusement park. Her nervous giggle at the thought turned into tremors shaking her whole body. Her teeth chattered like the dead of winter until she clamped her mouth shut.

  As they neared the front of the group, her steps grew smaller and smaller and she moved slower and slower. Her vision brightened. The blue of Teddy’s shirt blazed in front of her. The yellow of the head wrap on Beth intensified to dazzling sunlight. The red of Jed’s sweatshirt bloomed like a wildfire. Her knees locked and trembled. Goosebumps rose on her arms. She couldn’t breathe and her vision tunneled to gray at the edges.

  Someone grabbed her arms and whispered in her ear. “It’s okay. You can do this. The first time will be the hardest.”

  She opened her eyes wide and saw Teddy in front of her, his dark eyes comforting and warm. His rough hands ran up and down her arms in a gentle caress. Her breath slowed and her heart stopped racing.

  “I can do this.”

  He smiled. “Yes you can.”

  He took her hand and walked backward through the gate opening, pulling her along in a slow walk. Her breath hitched as the metal grazed her arms. And she was through.

  Every instinct told her to run to the truck they were sharing with Jack and Paul in front and Suz and Josh Logan riding in the bed. She turned slowly and took in the area. Only living, breathing people filled her gaze. A few zombs meandered down the road at the red line, but they moved no closer, even with them all outside, even thought their moans carried down the street. A sniff brought no rot and decay to her nose. Her ears detected no moans any closer than down the road.

  Commander Canida walked over and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you for doing this, Michelle. Seth told us what you’re willing to do. Can’t say I want to see you suck up to Bennett but he’s met everyone else. We need a new set of eyes and ears. Emily says you have some background to help us know whether we should be worried or not.”

  “If I can suck up to piss-poor police commissioners, I can do it for one slimy preacher. Although, I’m hoping he isn’t as bad as you are all making him out to be.”

  Jack and Paul laughed and Teddy wrapped a large arm around her shoulders. Warmth filled her. Not only from body heat, but from their belief in what she could do. For too long, she’d felt like her only contribution to survival was separating the darks from the lights and scrubbing out blood stains. She didn’t count patrol duty on the walls since most adults contributed there.

  They all piled into the truck. It bounced with Suz and Josh leaping into the back. She took a deep breath as the doors slammed shut. She stared out the window as they crossed the hum line marked in red paint on the street. Her fingers twisted together in her lap until Teddy placed a strong, warm hand on top of her own. They drove slow as men got out of cars from time to time to use crossbows and bolts on the few shambling skinbags.

  As they stopped at an intersection, Michelle gazed at the house on the corner. At one time, it must have been a cute house, judging by the roses, overgrown as they were, enclosing the front yard. A zomb’ banged against the front window of the house and she jumped. His hands and head left bloody circles on the dusty, smeared glass.

  “One of these days we’re gonna have to clear these out,” Paul commented from the front seat. “They’re just a broken window away from being on the loose. Good thing they don’t know how to use a doorknob.”

  “One thing at a time,” Jack said, stepping on the gas and driving forward. “We need to know whether Bennett is a problem or just an annoyance. You would think in the zombie apocalypse that the skinbags would be t
he worst thing to deal with, wouldn’t you?”

  First, General Peters and his zombie army, and now Reverend Bennett. Why couldn’t everyone just get along? Same shit, different day. The ongoing, endless battle of the haves and the have nots. Except, they didn’t seem to have anything the Reverend wanted.

  She sat up and her mouth dropped open as they approached the church. A banner fluttered down the front of the building proclaiming it the Fruitful Harvest Church in bright-blue paint. But that wasn’t what caught her attention.

  “What are they doing with those cages?”

  Teddy grimaced beside her and took her hand in his. “Those are the Resurrected. Don’t call them zombies, undead, or skinbags around him and his followers. For the rest of it, I’m going to let you get your own impressions. We’ll talk later.” He stopped talking and glared out the windshield.

  She looked up and saw Reverend Billy Joe Bennett standing in the doorway with his arms spread wide and a shit-eating grin on his face. A shudder ran down her spine. All he needed was sunglasses and ‘70s hair to be Jim Jones. He had that same mesmerizing smile on his face. The benevolent-father look, as if he were in his element here at the church.

  In college they’d studied Jones, Manson, and the other cult leaders. She’d never understood how people didn’t see through them. How they followed blindly. But there hadn’t been the apocalypse before. Could the end of the world as you knew it really make you sheep led to the slaughter? It wasn’t hard to imagine that lost people would flock together if someone said they had the answer to it all.

  Jack killed the motor and turned toward her. “Can you do this? You don’t have to. We can just go in as usual and you can sit with us.”

  She plastered what she was sure was as fake as smile as Bennett’s on her face and gazed up to Teddy with adoring, puppy-dog eyes. “Showtime.”

  He grabbed her chin lightly and got close to her as if he were lecturing her on her behavior. From outside it probably looked a lot worse than it felt. She nodded her head and sat still in her seat until Teddy got out, came around, and opened the door. Sliding out of the truck, she took his hand and stared at the ground as they walked to the building.

  The stench of the undead in and surrounding the cages rose up and gagged her. She couldn’t have looked up if she had wanted to, the need to pull her gun out of her boot and put them out of their misery would have shown on her face. Her fingers twisted in the soft fabric of her dress.

  She was yanked to a stop in front of a pair of red cowboy boots. Really, red cowboy boots? Did anyone over the age of ten own a pair of those? Teddy’s voice rumbled from beside her.

  “Reverend Bennett. Oh, sorry. Billy Joe. I told you I’d bring my woman one of these days.”

  My woman? An exasperated sign almost escaped her. She looked up and caught Bennett staring at her. With an intense glare, her vision softened and went out of focus. Mitch had once told her it made her look as if she’d instantly lost fifty IQ points.

  “This is Michelle. Honey, this is Reverend Billy Joe Bennett.”

  The man grabbed her hand to shake. “It is a pleasure to meet Mr. Ridgewood’s lady friend.”

  She gritted her back teeth until her jaw popped while still smiling at the slimy man. He gazed at Teddy as if he wanted to start a stud farm with the large man. She trembled when he turned his gaze on her as if he were measuring her hips for breeding and her breasts for feeding the future followers of his cult.

  Oh, hell to the no.

  Chapter Eleven

  Rule #6 Trust no one in the zombie apocalypse. The undead want to eat you and the living have their own agenda. No one has your best interest but you.

  Michelle fingered the end of her braid. Trying to not look around again, she forced her gaze on the pages of the worn, borrowed Bible in her hand but the words blurred as tears flooded her eyes again. Not one woman sitting around her on camp stools had hair longer than a soldier’s buzz cut. Some had head wraps like the one Beth had been wearing, although several seemed to be forced to show their chopped hair. One woman had been smacked upside her head when she’d tried to pull her shawl over her head in the frigid church. The spring-like warmth of outside refused to penetrate the dark, cold room.

  Desperation and fear poured off the women to flood her with a river of emotions. A plethora of hateful ideas to do in Bennett and his men served to make the preacher’s words from the front a bunch of blah, blah, blah like the drone of a dull classroom. Even if she hadn’t been so angry, she still wouldn’t have listened to his mutilation of the holy word. Every verse was bent to suit his twisted idea of how life should be. She didn’t recognize Bennett’s God of vengeance and evil doings.

  The only thing that would have made this worse would have been suffering through this with Maya at her side. She’d been introduced to the little bitch when they’d come into the church. She’d wanted to feel sorry for the teen bride to Billy Joe until the girl opened her mouth and looked at Bennett as if she’d give him a blow job right there in front of everyone if he’d asked her.

  She grimaced as she stared through the gauzy fabric strung across the back of the church. Teddy’s bright-blue shirt was a shapeless blob as seen from the women’s partition of the church meeting. The man was a good actor. He’d had her half-believing he wanted her to sit in the back. Out of sight and out of mind. Put the little woman in her place.

  Gritting her teeth, she turned the page of the Bible to keep up with Bennett’s pontificating. A small slip of paper fell into her lap. She straightened and unfolded it slowly. Heat flooded her face and her heart raced as she read the simple words.

  Help me. Please.

  She sat as still as a statue. It might be one of them. It might be all of them. There might be a spy in their midst. Staring straight ahead, she folded the paper as small as she could, bent down as if she needed to scratch her leg, and shoved the paper down her sock, deep into her boot.

  Turning another page she found another note. Another page, two more notes. Another page and another note. She gathered them together and stuck them into her boot unread. Turning her head showed every single woman refusing to meet her gaze. She whipped her head back around as Bennett finished and the men shouted ‘amen’ to the rafters like a movie version of a tent revival meeting. It had that quality of everyone play-acting as if all the talk of a woman’s place and men’s superiority couldn’t possibly be real.

  Squeaks and groans echoed from the pews as the men got up. The fabric made it impossible to discern individuals but she spotted a large group in a huddle, with, she assumed, the Reverend in the middle. Deep voices carried back to their location without understanding the words or conversations. The women were part of the church, but yet not.

  The slit in the fabric was yanked aside and a large man stomped through. He grabbed the arm of a woman with the remains of auburn hair on her head and pulled her off her stool and to his side.

  “Come,” he grunted.

  All he needed was a fur and a club to make the caveman act complete.

  She refrained from rolling her eyes as the pair disappeared through the curtain. That would make a mockery of all of this and it was all too real for those trapped in Bennett’s church, she couldn’t do that to the women surrounding her. Standing, she put the worn Bible on the stool and started walking to the opening. A gasp sounded beside her. Reaching, the woman stopped her with a hand on her wrist. Michelle looked into her face and the woman shook her head. Apparently, she had to be ‘collected’ like a child in Sunday school.

  She nodded back and waited as the men came for their wives, slaves, whatever they were. Teddy arrived and took her hand. The warmth of his skin and his smile settled her roiling stomach. They were almost done. She could do this a little longer.

  The church had emptied quickly as if a task was done and the people had other places to be. Bennett stepped in front of them, forcing Michelle and Teddy to stop. Her heart skipped a beat at the thought of the slips of paper in her boot burni
ng a hole in her sock. She forced her gaze away from her feet and stared at Billy Joe’s burgundy silk tie, a useless relic in the apocalypse.

  “Michelle,” he said. “I’m so glad you could come today. Teddy had told me so much about you that I couldn’t wait to meet the woman who he’d decided to make his own.”

  She looked up and into the big man’s eyes. “I’m glad that Teddy wanted me.”

  Bennett smiled at her and all she wanted to do was throw up on his stupid, red boots. “What did you think of my sermon, about a woman’s need to be submissive to her husband?”

  She gulped around the knot in her suddenly dry throat. Her answer couldn’t be too syrupy-sweet or he wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t be abrasive either, or she wouldn’t be able to come back again, undercover as it were.

  “I think lots of women fight it, but if you are sure of your husband it shouldn’t be hard to know he has your best interests at heart.”

  He smiled at her and a sliver of ice pierced her heart. “But what if the woman doesn’t understand why her husband has to do something? What if she doesn’t agree with his decision?”

  “Maybe that was okay before. To not agree, I mean,” she stuttered out. She leaned against Teddy’s side as if she needed him for support. “But the world belongs to the strong now, doesn’t it?”

  ***

  Billy Joe stood in the doorway as Ridgewood and Michelle walked past the cages of the Resurrected. The woman gripped onto the large man’s arm and hid her face in his side. He wrapped an arm around her and got her to the truck they’d driven to the church. Her whole demeanor shouted her need for the big, strong man at her side.

  A smile broke out across his face as his erection turned to stone in his pants. As soon as the vehicles were out of the parking lot and down the road, he reached and adjusted himself. The thought of the petite and demure Michelle had him heading inside, looking for something specific.